Even those 100 Dollar Textbooks Can Make Big Mistakes

The beginning of a college semester can tend to be quite excruciating when it comes to buy textbooks only realize that you've paid about 1000 dollars just buying reading material that will only get used for a few months. One of my books of this semester is on game theory titled, Games of Strategy third edition, which I believe I paid around 100 dollars for in January. The worst part about it is while this book has supposedly been edited it has left some pretty sizable errors that I or even someone not familiar with the subject matter are able to catch.

Chapter 17 is on Bidding Strategy and Auction Design. Page 660 talks about the types of auctions and reads:
"Other, less common, configurations also can be used to sell goods at auction. For example, you could set up an auction in which the highest bidder wins but the top two bidders pay their bids, or one in which the high bidder wins but all bidders pay their bids, a procedure discussed in Section 5. Although we do not attempt to consider all possible combinations in this chapter, we do analyze several of the most common auction schemes by using examples that bring out important strategic concepts."

Page 661 regarding Auction environments reads:
"Other, less common, configuarations also can be used to sell goods at auction. For example, you could set up an auction in which the highest bidder wins but the top two bidders pay their bids, or one in which the high bidder wins but all bidders pay their bids, a procedure discussed in Section 5. We do not attempt to consider all possible combinations here. Rather, we analyze several of the most common auction schemes by using examples that bring out important strategic concepts."

Being so close together, you would assume the editors would catch nearly identical paragraphs, but even they were unable to do what I did on my first reading of the chapter. Another less grievous error is that on page 722 the header states: "[CH. 17] BARGAINING" when it should state "[CH. 18] BARGAINING" because this page is on Chapter 18 and not 17 (in fact this page is closer to Chapter 19 than 18)

Now the book is selling for substantially less than I bought it for which makes me think a new edition is underway. With the make of a new edition the publishers and authors will end up getting a lot more money by preventing causing people to trash their old editions and causing resale...in other words benefiting for their own mistake. This is not so much a knack on this book; however, it is more of a criticism of the publishing industry in general that has a disincentive to produce good editions in the first place.